Auden's Call to Arms: 'Spain' and Psychoanalysis

Auden's 'Spain' is neither a war poem nor a political tract but a genuine call to arms in which the poet tries to motivate others to carry out what he had unsuccessfully attempted serving the Republican cause at the risk of life and limb. Auden's essentially Freudian way of thinking meant that he had to inspire his readership without resorting to Churchillian notions of heroism and national destiny or the Marxian dialectics of history. Auden's partial success is testimony to the poet's enormous ingenuity and talent but also to the moral and political limitations of psychoanalytic thinking.